Tom Cruise plays a Nazi colonel in a new film. Photo / Reuters

Tom Cruise plays a Nazi colonel in a new film. Photo / Reuters

BERLIN - Germany's Protestant Church compared the Hollywood film star Tom Cruise to the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels yesterday and claimed the actor was using his celebrity status to publicise the controversial church of Scientology of which he is a prominent member.

The criticism of Cruise, who is in Germany to make a film about an attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler, was the most vitriolic in a series of attacks on the actor over his membership of Scientology - an organisation regarded as a cult in Germany and kept under intelligence surveillance.

Thomas Gandow, 60, the German Protestant Church's chief spokesman on religious cults described Scientology as a "totalitarian organisation" and said that, because of his position as film star, Cruise had become "The Goebbels of Scientology."

In his film Valkyrie Tom Cruise, 45, plays Claus von Stauffenberg, a German army officer and aristocrat who tried to assassinate Hitler in 1944 by planting a bomb inside the Nazi leader's East Prussian headquarters.

However Gandow dismissed the film yesterday as "Propaganda for Scientology".

He added in a reference to the favourable publicity won by Hitler's Nazi party during the 1936 Berlin Olympic games: "This film will have the same propaganda advantages for Scientology as the 1936 Olympics had for the Nazis."

Gandow insisted that Cruise had simply come to Germany to campaign for restrictions on Scientology to be lifted.

His attack on the actor followed criticism from the German Defence Ministry which was reported to have banned the actor from filming at key military sites in Berlin which were authentic locations during the 1944 plot against Hitler.

The ministry made it clear that it objected to the fact that von Stauffenberg, one of Germany's few anti-Nazi resistance heroes, was being played by a Scientology member, it was claimed.

Berlin police subsequently refused to allow the actor to film at a police station in the city's Kreuzberg district, the reports said.

However, a spokesman for the finance ministry, which is responsible for granting permission to film at federal buildings, told the AFP News Agency that Berlin had no problem with the production, noting that Singer had won approval for all the sites on his wish list with just one exception.